arXiv subjects

Qingyu Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Qingyu Zhou.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Controllable Spoken Dialogue Generation: An LLM-Driven Grading System for K-12 Non-Native English Learners

Large language models (LLMs) often fail to meet the pedagogical needs of K-12 English learners in non-native contexts due to a proficiency mismatch. To address this widespread challenge, we introduce a proficiency-aligned framework that adapts LLM outputs to learner abilities, using China's national curriculum (CSE) as a representative case. Our framework enables precise control over lexical complexity through a four-tier grading system, supported by a comprehensive suite of new resources: graded vocabulary lists and a multi-turn dialogue corpus. Our core technical contribution is the \textbf{DDPO} algorithm,Diversity Driven Policy Optimization, a multi-turn GRPO-based approach designed to preserve dialogue diversity while holistically optimizing dialogue quality. This method significantly outperforms conventional approaches, achieving low out-of-vocabulary rates and high diversity while enhancing conversational naturalness and pedagogical value. While grounded in the CSE, our framework is designed for flexibility and can be readily adapted to other educational standards. Our models, data, and code will all be open-sourced, providing a scalable platform for personalized English speaking practice that effectively addresses the unique challenges faced by K-12 learners in non-immersive environments.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Cognitive Mismatch in Multimodal Large Language Models for Discrete Symbol Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) perform strongly on natural images, yet their ability to understand discrete visual symbols remains unclear. We present a multi-domain benchmark spanning language, culture, mathematics, physics and chemistry, organized into three cognitive levels: perception and recognition, combination and reasoning, and association and critical thinking. Across leading MLLMs, we observe a consistent cognitive mismatch. Models frequently underperform on elementary symbol recognition while appearing relatively competent on more complex reasoning tasks. This recognition-reasoning inversion indicates that current systems often compensate with linguistic priors, template retrieval or procedural reasoning instead of robust visual grounding. The pattern is especially clear for sparse, low-redundancy symbols such as handwritten characters, formula graphs, circuit diagrams and chemical structures. These results show that symbolic understanding remains a major bottleneck for multimodal intelligence and motivate training and evaluation schemes that prioritize grounded perception in discrete semantic spaces.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

CLEME2.0: Towards Interpretable Evaluation by Disentangling Edits for Grammatical Error Correction

The paper focuses on the interpretability of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) evaluation metrics, which received little attention in previous studies. To bridge the gap, we introduce **CLEME2.0**, a reference-based metric describing four fundamental aspects of GEC systems: hit-correction, wrong-correction, under-correction, and over-correction. They collectively contribute to exposing critical qualities and locating drawbacks of GEC systems. Evaluating systems by combining these aspects also leads to superior human consistency over other reference-based and reference-less metrics. Extensive experiments on two human judgment datasets and six reference datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, achieving a new state-of-the-art result. Our codes are released at https://github.com/THUKElab/CLEME.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

When LLMs Meet Cunning Texts: A Fallacy Understanding Benchmark for Large Language Models

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) make remarkable evolutions in language understanding and generation. Following this, various benchmarks for measuring all kinds of capabilities of LLMs have sprung up. In this paper, we challenge the reasoning and understanding abilities of LLMs by proposing a FaLlacy Understanding Benchmark (FLUB) containing cunning texts that are easy for humans to understand but difficult for models to grasp. Specifically, the cunning texts that FLUB focuses on mainly consist of the tricky, humorous, and misleading texts collected from the real internet environment. And we design three tasks with increasing difficulty in the FLUB benchmark to evaluate the fallacy understanding ability of LLMs. Based on FLUB, we investigate the performance of multiple representative and advanced LLMs, reflecting our FLUB is challenging and worthy of more future study. Interesting discoveries and valuable insights are achieved in our extensive experiments and detailed analyses. We hope that our benchmark can encourage the community to improve LLMs' ability to understand fallacies. Our data and codes are available at https://github.com/THUKElab/FLUB.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Phrase Representation by Information Bottleneck Guided Text Diffusion Process for Keyphrase Extraction

Keyphrase extraction (KPE) is an important task in Natural Language Processing for many scenarios, which aims to extract keyphrases that are present in a given document. Many existing supervised methods treat KPE as sequential labeling, span-level classification, or generative tasks. However, these methods lack the ability to utilize keyphrase information, which may result in biased results. In this study, we propose Diff-KPE, which leverages the supervised Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) to guide the text diffusion process for generating enhanced keyphrase representations. Diff-KPE first generates the desired keyphrase embeddings conditioned on the entire document and then injects the generated keyphrase embeddings into each phrase representation. A ranking network and VIB are then optimized together with rank loss and classification loss, respectively. This design of Diff-KPE allows us to rank each candidate phrase by utilizing both the information of keyphrases and the document. Experiments show that Diff-KPE outperforms existing KPE methods on a large open domain keyphrase extraction benchmark, OpenKP, and a scientific domain dataset, KP20K.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters

Writing assistance is an application closely related to human life and is also a fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) research field. Its aim is to improve the correctness and quality of input texts, with character checking being crucial in detecting and correcting wrong characters. From the perspective of the real world where handwriting occupies the vast majority, characters that humans get wrong include faked characters (i.e., untrue characters created due to writing errors) and misspelled characters (i.e., true characters used incorrectly due to spelling errors). However, existing datasets and related studies only focus on misspelled characters mainly caused by phonological or visual confusion, thereby ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult. To break through this dilemma, we present Visual-C$^3$, a human-annotated Visual Chinese Character Checking dataset with faked and misspelled Chinese characters. To the best of our knowledge, Visual-C$^3$ is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. Additionally, we also propose and evaluate novel baseline methods on Visual-C$^3$. Extensive empirical results and analyses show that Visual-C$^3$ is high-quality yet challenging. The Visual-C$^3$ dataset and the baseline methods will be publicly available to facilitate further research in the community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

CLEME: Debiasing Multi-reference Evaluation for Grammatical Error Correction

Evaluating the performance of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems is a challenging task due to its subjectivity. Designing an evaluation metric that is as objective as possible is crucial to the development of GEC task. However, mainstream evaluation metrics, i.e., reference-based metrics, introduce bias into the multi-reference evaluation by extracting edits without considering the presence of multiple references. To overcome this issue, we propose Chunk-LEvel Multi-reference Evaluation (CLEME), designed to evaluate GEC systems in the multi-reference evaluation setting. CLEME builds chunk sequences with consistent boundaries for the source, the hypothesis and references, thus eliminating the bias caused by inconsistent edit boundaries. Furthermore, we observe the consistent boundary could also act as the boundary of grammatical errors, based on which the F$_{0.5}$ score is then computed following the correction independence assumption. We conduct experiments on six English reference sets based on the CoNLL-2014 shared task. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the correctness of our discovery and the effectiveness of CLEME. Further analysis reveals that CLEME is robust to evaluate GEC systems across reference sets with varying numbers of references and annotation style.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check

In recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks, which mostly solve this task in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we propose to decompose the CSC workflow into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks so that the rich external knowledge about the Chinese language can be leveraged more directly and efficiently. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play detection-and-reasoning module that is compatible with existing SOTA non-autoregressive CSC models to further boost their performance. We find that the detection-and-reasoning module trained for one model can also benefit other models. We also study the primary interpretability provided by the task decomposition. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Unifying Token and Span Level Supervisions for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Few-shot sequence labeling aims to identify novel classes based on only a few labeled samples. Existing methods solve the data scarcity problem mainly by designing token-level or span-level labeling models based on metric learning. However, these methods are only trained at a single granularity (i.e., either token level or span level) and have some weaknesses of the corresponding granularity. In this paper, we first unify token and span level supervisions and propose a Consistent Dual Adaptive Prototypical (CDAP) network for few-shot sequence labeling. CDAP contains the token-level and span-level networks, jointly trained at different granularities. To align the outputs of two networks, we further propose a consistent loss to enable them to learn from each other. During the inference phase, we propose a consistent greedy inference algorithm that first adjusts the predicted probability and then greedily selects non-overlapping spans with maximum probability. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

On the (In)Effectiveness of Large Language Models for Chinese Text Correction

Recently, the development and progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) have amazed the entire Artificial Intelligence community. Benefiting from their emergent abilities, LLMs have attracted more and more researchers to study their capabilities and performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. While marveling at LLMs' incredible performance on all kinds of tasks, we notice that they also have excellent multilingual processing capabilities, such as Chinese. To explore the Chinese processing ability of LLMs, we focus on Chinese Text Correction, a fundamental and challenging Chinese NLP task. Specifically, we evaluate various representative LLMs on the Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) tasks, which are two main Chinese Text Correction scenarios. Additionally, we also fine-tune LLMs for Chinese Text Correction to better observe the potential capabilities of LLMs. From extensive analyses and comparisons with previous state-of-the-art small models, we empirically find that the LLMs currently have both amazing performance and unsatisfactory behavior for Chinese Text Correction. We believe our findings will promote the landing and application of LLMs in the Chinese NLP community.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Contextual Similarity is More Valuable than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recently, related researches focus on introducing character similarity from confusion set to enhance the CSC models, ignoring the context of characters that contain richer information. To make better use of contextual information, we propose a simple yet effective Curriculum Learning (CL) framework for the CSC task. With the help of our model-agnostic CL framework, existing CSC models will be trained from easy to difficult as humans learn Chinese characters and achieve further performance improvements. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used SIGHAN datasets show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. More instructively, our study empirically suggests that contextual similarity is more valuable than character similarity for the CSC task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Instance Segmentation for Chinese Character Stroke Extraction, Datasets and Benchmarks

Stroke is the basic element of Chinese character and stroke extraction has been an important and long-standing endeavor. Existing stroke extraction methods are often handcrafted and highly depend on domain expertise due to the limited training data. Moreover, there are no standardized benchmarks to provide a fair comparison between different stroke extraction methods, which, we believe, is a major impediment to the development of Chinese character stroke understanding and related tasks. In this work, we present the first public available Chinese Character Stroke Extraction (CCSE) benchmark, with two new large-scale datasets: Kaiti CCSE (CCSE-Kai) and Handwritten CCSE (CCSE-HW). With the large-scale datasets, we hope to leverage the representation power of deep models such as CNNs to solve the stroke extraction task, which, however, remains an open question. To this end, we turn the stroke extraction problem into a stroke instance segmentation problem. Using the proposed datasets to train a stroke instance segmentation model, we surpass previous methods by a large margin. Moreover, the models trained with the proposed datasets benefit the downstream font generation and handwritten aesthetic assessment tasks. We hope these benchmark results can facilitate further research. The source code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/lizhaoliu-Lec/CCSE.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recent researches start from the pretrained knowledge of language models and take multimodal information into CSC models to improve the performance. However, they overlook the rich knowledge in the dictionary, the reference book where one can learn how one character should be pronounced, written, and used. In this paper, we propose the LEAD framework, which renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. LEAD first constructs positive and negative samples according to the knowledge of character phonetics, glyphs, and definitions in the dictionary. Then a unified contrastive learning-based training scheme is employed to refine the representations of the CSC models. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on the SIGHAN benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is both a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. Recently, many data-driven approaches are proposed for the development of CGEC research. However, there are two major limitations in the CGEC field: First, the lack of high-quality annotated training corpora prevents the performance of existing CGEC models from being significantly improved. Second, the grammatical errors in widely used test sets are not made by native Chinese speakers, resulting in a significant gap between the CGEC models and the real application. In this paper, we propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. Additionally, we present a challenging CGEC benchmark derived entirely from errors made by native Chinese speakers in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses not only demonstrate that the training data constructed by our method effectively improves the performance of CGEC models, but also reflect that our benchmark is an excellent resource for further development of the CGEC field.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the model inference. However, teachers always have these answers in mind to review and correct assignments. In this paper, we focus on the Chinese cloze tests correction and propose a multimodal approach (named AiM). The encoded representations of answers interact with the visual information of students' handwriting. Instead of predicting 'right' or 'wrong', we perform the sequence labeling on the answer text to infer which answer character differs from the handwritten content in a fine-grained way. We take samples of OCR datasets as the positive samples for this task, and develop a negative sample augmentation method to scale up the training data. Experimental results show that AiM outperforms OCR-based methods by a large margin. Extensive studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our multimodal approach.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Automatic Context Pattern Generation for Entity Set Expansion

Entity Set Expansion (ESE) is a valuable task that aims to find entities of the target semantic class described by given seed entities. Various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) downstream applications have benefited from ESE due to its ability to discover knowledge. Although existing corpus-based ESE methods have achieved great progress, they still rely on corpora with high-quality entity information annotated, because most of them need to obtain the context patterns through the position of the entity in a sentence. Therefore, the quality of the given corpora and their entity annotation has become the bottleneck that limits the performance of such methods. To overcome this dilemma and make the ESE models free from the dependence on entity annotation, our work aims to explore a new ESE paradigm, namely corpus-independent ESE. Specifically, we devise a context pattern generation module that utilizes autoregressive language models (e.g., GPT-2) to automatically generate high-quality context patterns for entities. In addition, we propose the GAPA, a novel ESE framework that leverages the aforementioned GenerAted PAtterns to expand target entities. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on three widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. All the codes of our experiments are available at https://github.com/geekjuruo/GAPA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, most prior works assign a label to each token based on the token-level similarities, which ignores the integrality of named entities or slots. To this end, in this paper, we propose ESD, an Enhanced Span-based Decomposition method for FSSL. ESD formulates FSSL as a span-level matching problem between test query and supporting instances. Specifically, ESD decomposes the span matching problem into a series of span-level procedures, mainly including enhanced span representation, class prototype aggregation and span conflicts resolution. Extensive experiments show that ESD achieves the new state-of-the-art results on two popular FSSL benchmarks, FewNERD and SNIPS, and is proven to be more robust in the nested and noisy tagging scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wangpeiyi9979/ESD.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Type-Driven Multi-Turn Corrections for Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors. In this aspect, dominant models are trained by one-iteration learning while performing multiple iterations of corrections during inference. Previous studies mainly focus on the data augmentation approach to combat the exposure bias, which suffers from two drawbacks. First, they simply mix additionally-constructed training instances and original ones to train models, which fails to help models be explicitly aware of the procedure of gradual corrections. Second, they ignore the interdependence between different types of corrections. In this paper, we propose a Type-Driven Multi-Turn Corrections approach for GEC. Using this approach, from each training instance, we additionally construct multiple training instances, each of which involves the correction of a specific type of errors. Then, we use these additionally-constructed training instances and the original one to train the model in turn. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show that our approach significantly benefits the model training. Particularly, our enhanced model achieves state-of-the-art single-model performance on English GEC benchmarks. We release our code at Github.

cs.CL↗